The Last Night on Earth (dreamtime)

It's the night of December 20th, 2012. I'm at a huge party in a downtown hotel in my dream city. Everyone I know is there, even people I knew in high school and haven't seen since. I spot MHZ in the crowd at several points, although as usual, he's avoiding me and / or being dragged around by the latest psycho girlfriend who's attached herself to him like a leech. I'm shocked at how badly he's aged.

Midnight is fast approaching, and although the exact time of whatever's going to happen is unknown, midnight is as good a time as any to cut loose. We spill out into the parking lot outside and see that the entire front wall of the hotel (a seamless sheet of mirrored, reinforced glass) has shattered into diamond-like cubes all over the pavement, mixing with the snow and glitter from the partygoers.

In less than 10 seconds, I've got little bits of glass in both of my shoes. In less than 20 seconds, the glass bits have put runs in both of my (outrageously expensive) stockings. I sit down on the hood of an expensive-looking sports car and shake the glass out of my shoes. The hotel employees are hanging up giant sheets of mylar (I assume it's mylar - it's got that sort of shiny quality to it) and trying to keep out a horde of people spilling over from another party in a skeevy strip club / swinger bar down the block. Some cops show up and attempt to stop the incipient orgy in the parking lot.

There's a sudden flash of light, and I think this is it, with a weird thrill of mingled anticipation and dread. But it's just the fireworks starting - starbursts of white and violet and green breaking open the sky and glittering in the windows of the skyscrapers and the broken glass on the pavement. The booming of the fireworks is drowned out by a rushing noise, and I turn to look in the direction of the river and see the water creeping up the banks and hundreds of boats floating past with people crowding the decks and waving at everyone onshore.

S. grabs my hand and grins at me.

"Here comes the flood," he says.

Down in the Valley-O (dreamtime)

I'm staying in a village in an isolated valley with a group of friends. Most of them are warriors, and I haven't seen them since we arrived. I assume they're keeping busy hunting and trekking around the valley. For some reason, we can't leave - the villagers are afraid of something on the heights that they won't speak of. Every time I try to walk up the paths towards the valley walls, I get this sick feeling like something's crushing down on me, making it impossible to breathe.

The village has no contact with the outside world. They grow wheat for bread, raise sheep for milk and wool and meat, chickens for eggs, and have vegetable gardens and a small orchard. I have no idea what date it is, only the time of year. There is a small church or temple, but there are no symbols to indicate what faith these people practice, and I can't read their language, although I can speak it, or we speak the same one.

I am getting impatient - we've been stuck here for so long because I burned out all my power in a fight, but now I have recovered, and we should leave. I go to talk to one of the healers, who tells me that my friends have spent the last several weeks at his house after they tried to climb up a ridge. He says he would be happy to let them stay, but he's running out of food. I haven't been aware of any of this, and after giving him pretty much all of the rest of my money, I go off and try to get some answers from the other villagers about what the hell is going on in this valley. Predictably, they close ranks and in a few cases become openly hostile.

The POV switches to a sort of omniscient perspective at this point - I'm with a friend (nobody I recognize from waking life, but I've met her before in dreams) in a big room cluttered with old toys - action figures, Lego pieces, model vehicles of various kinds, and scenery from wargames and dismantled train layouts. I'm looking for fantasy-medieval action figures and accessories to represent my group. Unfortunately, most of the figures are mechs or based on films (Batman, Star Wars, etc.) and are therefore the wrong genre.

Just before I woke up, we were starting up a narrow path zigzagging up the valley wall, and there was a greenish tinge to the sky and a weird crackly feeling in the air like the moment before a lightning strike.

The Bang and the Clatter as an Angel Hits the Ground (Mage)

Surprisingly, Rosemary is proving relatively easy to find - all Phenex has to do is follow the trail of blown speakers and stoned angelheads shouting at each other over the ringing in their ears. She's making her way towards Fata's camp, which suits Phenex fine, because he's got a nasty suspicion about who might have started all this.

* * * * * * * *
Storm's coming. It's weird seeing the clouds rushing around the sky like that like they're in some kind of almighty hurry like when Daddy said the seals would be broken and the sun the sun the sun's on fire and I really think there's something wrong with me even though I don't feel sick. Sunstroke. Maybe I've got a fever and Mama's giving me iced tea and sponging my forehead with a cool washcloth and I'm gonna wake up with two weeks' worth of homework to do and wanting to eat everything in sight horizon to horizon and that thunder's giving me a heck of a headache. There's that tree again pretty all bright and silvery with little lights but that's not where I'm supposed to be right now and here comes the lady with the cards and she's looking all worried which is awful sweet of her but you know I think I'm okay now and I try to tell her that but I don't know if I'm talking or if it's just my inside voice.

"Two spoons... it's two spoons."

Two spoons of what? Sugar sugar water in my iced tea I never did get that lemonade but the tea was pretty good even if it was kind of bitter like wormwood the water tastes of ashes and wormwood where's Median where's my mom? Cardlady puts her hands over her ears all of a sudden and I think I might have given her my headache sorry cardlady cloudlady storm's coming...

* * * * * * * *
Median and Inri catch up to Phenex as he's shouting questions at Fata, who seems to be having trouble hearing him. She's moaning and holding her head, and as they approach Median can finally make out what she's saying:

"Too soon - she's starting too soon."

Phenex is furious.

"I know it's too fucking soon! That goddamn little weasel ratshit bastard thought it would be funny to dose her up, and now she's waking up and probably giving half the fucking sensitives in this camp an aneurysm with the noise she's been generating. We're going to find her first, but after Inri's talked her down, if she manages to talk her down, I'm coming back to feed Alias his nuts."

"Sonofabitch, I should have guessed," Median mutters, "The Devil and the Moon..."

* * * * * * * *
Time stutters and surges increasingly erratically around Rosemary as she staggers aimlessly through Black Rock City, trailing a cone of psychic feedback in her wake. She's no longer even thinking in words, much less in complete sentences. The less sensitive inhabitants of various encampments attempt to entertain, soothe, or restrain her, because she's obviously on something heavy, but she always manages to slip away, moving along a wobbly spiral path towards the epicentre of the festival, The Man. The flourescent tubes and strings of twinkling LED lights start to flicker as she approaches, then explode as the storm around her overloads the circuits.

She looks up, a rabbit frozen in highbeams, as the Man becomes a fountain of sparks. Her father's voice thunders passages from Revelation in her head.

* * * * * * * *
A lot of people... well, our kind of people, anyway, never really get why I ran. Other people mostly do, especially if they've been raised religious. Anybody who's read the Bible knows why people fall on their knees when an angel comes. Nowadays it seems everyone talks about their guardian angels and has coffee mugs or tote bags with cute little babies with wings on them, and that's not what they're like. That's not it at all.

Angels are... they're huge and terrible things with wings that blot out the sun and voices like every window in the world breaking at once. When they come, you can be pretty sure that someone's going to die. Or at least wish they were dead. So I ran like hell when I saw the angel. And yeah, from the outside it was just the Man, but where I was it was also an angel, with a spire of light stabbing into the sky behind it. And the light was all around me and it just wouldn't stop or fade away, so then I fell on my knees, because I figured maybe if I stayed down it wouldn't see me.

Canadian Democracy?

Well, Mr. Harper has managed to convince Her Majesty's representative, Governer General Michaëlle Jean to prorogue Parliament until January 26th, which means that we are effectively without a functional government for the next seven weeks. Way to go, Steve - instead of either trying to reach consensus with the other Members of Parliament elected by 62% of the 59% of the population of this apathetic bloody excuse for a country who bothered to vote [Note: To any suddenly rabid Tory supporters reading this who have been screaming about the coalition but didn't bother to vote, I suggest you go into the kitchen and dish yourself up a nice big bowl of "shut the fuck up".], we're stuck with a minority government who'd rather spend the better part of the next two months taking cheap shots at the opposition from behind the Queen's skirts. Nice.

I'm not saying I don't have grave misgivings about the whole notion of a coalition government, particularly one led by Stephane Dion, who's got so many daggers stuck into his back at the moment that he resembles a pincushion. However, the fact that Mr. Harper seems to feel that he can govern this country as though he'd been handed a landslide majority in the last election damn well needs to be answered with a resounding, "Hell no, you didn't." The fact that he decided to turn a plan to deal with the economic crisis into an attempt to financially eviscerate his political opponents makes him look not only like an arrogant idiot, but a mean-spirited asshole as well, particularly considering that the $30 million that the government would have saved by cutting the political party funding is basically just a drop in the bucket.

Ms. Jean's hands may well be tied by legal considerations, but this whole situation makes me inclined to join the anti-monarchist faction.

The only silver lining here might be the fact that if the public can muster sufficient outrage over this, the Tories might consider acting like adults and negotiate with the other parties.

Oh, and as far as the carrying on about the Liberals and NDs getting into bed with [OMFG] the scary treasonous separatists - when was the last time Quebec separation was seriously on the political agenda? Seriously - the Bloc hasn't said boo about it since 1995. They're basically a left-leaning regional party. You know, the way the Reform Party was a right-leaning regional party before they got sick of being ignored by Ottawa, held their noses, and got into bed with the Tories.

Signal to Noise (dreamtime)

I'm flipping idly through a game module for some long out-of-print RPG - it's for an adventure in a "Forbidden City" which, by the setting blurb, sounds a lot like something Lovecraft or Chambers would have devoted pages of florid yet vague descriptive text to. The creepy thing is that the front cover of the module has been damaged, so the name of the city is obscured, as though water has been spilled on the cover and left long enough to bleed the ink down the paper. The really creepy thing is that every instance of the city's name has also been carefully excised from the book - not just crossed out or covered with white-out, but cut out neatly, so there are small holes in several of the pages.

Needless to say, I buy the module and make plans to run it using WoD rules.

The POV switches at this point to the action in the game itself. The party (including myself) is picking its way through a series of caves which turn out to be the ruins of a massive highway interchange on the outskirts of The City*

[* The City is a place I frequently end up in my dreaming life. It's huge, contains elements of every place I've ever lived and a few I've simply visualized from books, and for some reason contains large stretches of urban decay - not the dangerous, crime-riddled variety, but the wasteland that's left after even the criminals decide to move to a nicer neighbourhood with a better class of people. We're talking the Bronx during the late 1970s - early 1980s. Or maybe postwar Dresden. The Ciry also contains a huge university, a deeply confusing and arbitrary public transit system, and, inexplicably, an amusement park.]

There are five of us, and five small children. One of the kids is our guide, the others... from sketchy reports of this nameless place and what other people have told us, apparenty young children are the only people able to find their way around the city without becoming paralyzed with nausea from the bizarre geometry of the place. The unspoken reason they're with us, which I'm really not happy about, is that they can't run as fast as adults, so it's like the old joke about not having to outrun the bear, but the other person you're hiking with, only not funny at all. I've made a private resolution that this is not going to happen, no matter what sorts of godawful things we run into.

We finally reach the gates, where a bridge leading to the main entrance has been collapsed into a deep gorge separating the city from the surrounding countryside. Despite the place's reputation, there are a hell of a lot of people milling around, to the point that there's actually a lineup for the improvised cablecar visitors use to get across the gorge. I remark that for an allegedly forbidden city, there are an awful lot of damned tourists. Nobody laughs.

X. and M. wait in line. The kids go off to play with the hordes of other kids building forts out of rubble, chucking stones into the gorge, play-fighting with sticks, and other stuff kids do when left to their own devices. R., V., and I wander around to try to get some more reliable information on what exactly we're getting into here. A frail-looking blonde woman is sitting on a parapet overlooking the gorge, and she smiles at us when we approach. She's perfectly happy to talk to us, chatting about the inhabitants of the city, including her sister, who she's visiting. She says she's never heard of any monsters, and the people are no more mad than they are anywhere else. She brushes some hair away from her face, and I see a small black square on one cheek. V. stiffens and walks away without another word to her, and I make some excuse and hurry after him.

"What was that all about? She was being helpful!"

"Oh yes, very helpful. Didn't you see that mark on her face? She's starting to pixellate. We can't trust a word she says."

"It was just the one square!"

"On her face - but she was wearing long robes. For all we know, she could be nothing but static under there. I'm not willing to take the chance."

When I look more closely at the people waiting in line, I notice that the majority of them, particularly those who have been here before, have parts of their body missing - the area where the limb should be is a hole filled with grey static. Their voices, too, are occasionally obscured by the hiss of a dead radio or occasionally rise into a sharp whine of feedback. The little girl guiding us comes up and stares at me solemnly.

"It's nothing like monsters, really. Mainly it's just that when you can't see or hear anything in particular, you start to make stuff up."

Ash Tourist (dreamtime)

I'm packing a bunch of Pooh Bear's old clothes, soap and other toiletries, and stationery supplies in an old messenger bag. I plan to leave it in a visible location in the Land Rover when we arrive at the camp - the dossier said that the locals' pride would not let them accept charity, but the aid workers have an arrangement worked out. They leave the donations in easy-to-steal bags in convenient locations, and the recipients get to tell their friends that they put one over on the foreigners.

The landscape is flat and grey and barren, with low mountains in the distance. There is a light dusting of frost or ash on the rocky ground. The sky is almost the same shade of grey, and there's a sharp, cold wind, whipping fine grit through the thin air. I don't understand what these people are doing out here. There are no cities, no rivers, and the land obviously isn't capable of supporting anything in the way of edible vegetation. Surely there must be someplace a little less inhospitable they could stay.

At this point, the dream starts to get a little strange. There are several small replicas of ancient temples dotting the plain. They are whitish-grey and appear to be made of local stone. There's a replica of the Parthenon, the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, Hagia Sophia, and (of course) Stonehenge. None of them is more than about seven feet high. There is also a pair of gigantic legs straddling the road. The rest of the body is nowhere in sight.

We arrive at the aid workers' base, which appears to have been set up in an abandoned air base. The workers' tents are inside the hangars, mostly for added protection from the wind and dust. A couple of other people in the Land Rover get out and demand to know where we are, because the base was definitely south of the legs and this is west. I have no idea what direction we came from, because everything looks the same, but quibbling about directions strikes me as a bit stupid, considering that this base is the only landmark other than the temples in the area anyway.

I walk out and go to the other part of the camp. Sullen-eyed people of indeterminate ethnicity watch me from shacks made of scrap metal from the hangar and tarps and tents from the aid workers. Apparently the stones here are flammable, because that's what they're using to cook the field rations they've "stolen". They wear colourful clothes in strangely shiny iridescent fabrics. I allow one of the kids, a little girl, to pick my pocket. She takes the handful of candy back to her gang a short distance away.

I woke up shortly after this.